I was recently pleased to be able to find out more about the UK Company Megnajet, when I visited Graham Strudwick – Technical Director and Steve Childs Business Development at their business premises in Kettering, Northants. Within a few minutes of talking to Graham and Steve, I realised that this company has some very credible customers and it is great to see a true UK manufacturing success hidden amongst the houses in Kettering.

I asked Graham about their philosophy for this success.

Since the company was formed they have focused on developing Compact Ink Managemet Systems (CIMS) with two things in mind, simplicity of integration to the customer and reliability. I referred to their product philosophy as being ‘Lean, mean and very efficient ‘. Their distribution technology is all manufactured in their offices, and their range of turnkey CIMS and OEM modules for integration are all built on field proven technology.

Like many in the UK who came from the Cambridge Technology hub, Graham has vast technical experience and a passion for developing a responsive and effective technology as well as an expertise in building systems. Their ink distribution technology has the advantage of flexibility and speed of delivery, which Graham feels is key to the success they have.

I asked Steve about their products and customers.

"Our standard range of products caters for most industrial inkjet print heads in the market place today (and some still yet to be released!); End shooter print heads such as the Kyocera KJ4, Konica Minolta KM512/ KM1024i, Ricoh Gen4, Gen5. Low flow and medium flow recirculating print heads such as the Dimatix SG1024 Starfire along with the brand new Dimatix Samba. High flow print heads such as the Xaar 1001, 1002, 1003, Kyocera High Flow, TTEc CF1 and the Seiko, RC1536 to name but a few.

Current customers include Cyan Tec and Ricoh who were displaying their new system at Drupa last week, within their showcase of Industrial printing technologies.

Typically, we find the main criterion for our customers is simplicity and proven reliability. As with all our turnkey ink systems you only need to supply power, PC and the ink or fluid, give or take ½ an hour your head will be in a good state to start printing!. This gives you a shortened time to market, reduced technical overhead and risk along with reliability within your product through use of proven technology.

For customers taking things a step further and wanting their own design of ink system we also offer technical consultancy on ink system design coupled with a proven range of OEM networkable modules and controllers helping you to reduce again your technical risk and time to market whilst still maintaining your own unique system design.

We also recently started shipping our manifold based recirculation units aimed at scanning head and small footprint systems using high flow recirculation heads such as Xaar 1001, 1002, 1003, Kyocera High Flow, TTEc CF1 Seiko RC1536,

What are the biggest markets for you? And where do you see the greatest opportunities for the future?

One of our biggest markets has to be labels and packaging, the scope is huge for inkjet. We are increasingly hearing from developer and integrators wanting ink delivery systems for bespoke machinery in this field. One of our advantages is that we can develop a system with little fluid to get things going. This works well in pharmaceutical, or food grade and functional fluid markets.

Our sales are pretty strong and currently evenly matched across Europe, India, Japan & USA but we have seen strong upturn in investment in the USA and Japan both becoming big markets for us particularly packaging in the US as this market is growing fast

What are the challenges for you as a business?

Graham : The challenge for us is twofold as we continue to grow at a rapid rate, we need more technical people who ‘get it’ quickly and can deliver real value and also we need to manage the fact that some ‘big end’ users are starting to build units themselves to put into the production line. This changes the sales dynamic and we need to respond to this.Steve: As with any company, we have strong healthy competition but we know our product and that we are able to bespoke to suit individually the OEM’s needs. We do also have strong relationships with the OEM’s and this helps us to continue to grow and to respond positively to their needs.

Should you like to find out more about Megnajet please go to www.megnajet.com or contact steve.childs@megnajet.com